Vessel segmentation and blood flow simulation using Level-Sets and Embedded Boundary methods

In this article we address the problem of blood flow simulation in realistic vascular objects. The anatomical surfaces are extracted by means of Level-Sets methods that accurately model the complex and varying surfaces of pathological objects such as aneurysms and stenoses. The surfaces obtained are defined at the sub-pixel level where they intersect the Cartesian grid of the image domain. It is therefore straightforward to construct embedded boundary representations of these objects on the same grid, for which recent work has enabled discretization of the Navier-Stokes equations for incompressible fluids. While most classical techniques require construction of a structured mesh that approximates the surface in order to extrapolate a 3D finite-element gridding of the whole volume, our method directly simulates the blood flow inside the extracted surface without losing any complicated details and without building additional grids. (C) 2004 CARS and Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.